Then the departures began in earnest. One departure that was definitely not imagined was Senior Communications Secretary Katrina McKeever. She had been the liaison with Meghan’s family in the early days. She quietly left the Kensington Palace Press Office in September 2018 amidst reports of flurries of emails descending upon her from Meghan starting at 5am every morning. Meghan was a volcano erupting with idea after idea about how she wanted to shape her role. Her work ethic was formidable, and so, staff said, was she. Too much so.
Two months later, Meghan’s Personal Assistant Melissa Toubati left amidst claims that Meghan frequently reduced her to tears with her endless demands. Toubati had previously worked for Robbie Williams and Ayda Field, and was so capable that a palace source was authorised to praise her performance and make special note of the crucial role she had played in helping to organise the royal wedding.
To those in the know, this was code for Meghan being impossible, though Meghan and Harry themselves believed that their demands were reasonable. They were on a quest to save the world and nothing mattered more than that cause. If people were petty and needlessly negative, they had no place in the grand scheme of things. Meghan had a strong work ethic so drove herself and everyone else hard. Harry appreciated her commitment and, by his own account, her values. She gave of her all, and expected others to do likewise. If the fainthearted wanted to discard themselves by the wayside, they were entitled to do so. But they mustn’t expect her to deviate from her path of righteousness because they were too weak to stay the course.
Two months after Melissa Toubati’s tearful departure, the revolving door again creaked into action when it was announced that Amy Pickerell, Meghan’s Assistant Private Secretary who was often described as her ‘right hand woman’, would be exiting when Meghan and Harry’s baby was born. She was joined by the Communications Secretary for the Sussexes and the Cambridges, Jason Knauf, who was leaving to become Chief Executive of the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The Royal Foundation had been set up in September 2009 before William and Harry’s marriages as the vehicle for their charity work. Both brides had joined their husbands upon marriage, in what became known as the Fab Four.
Then, as the world awaited the birth of Harry and Meghan’s baby, word leaked out that the fractured relationships hadn’t been limited to staff, and that the brothers’ once close relationship had also hit the rocks. There was confirmation of a sort when Harry and Meghan announced that they would be moving offices from their shared space with William and Catherine to their own office at Buckingham Palace, and moreover they would be leaving the Royal Foundation which the two brothers had set up, to set up their own charity, Sussex Royal. They would have their own public relations chief and Instagram account. They would also be leaving Kensington Palace to live at Frogmore Cottage, ironically Grand Duchess Xenia’s refuge following the overthrow of her brother Tsar Nicholas II. Meghan might not have got to wear her kokoshnik, but she would be living in her house.
That Christmas, the newlyweds joined the rest of the Royal Family at Sandringham for their first Christmas as a married couple. By then, the rumours of estrangement between the brothers and their wives had gained enough traction for the press to be speculating upon its cause. The story was not going the way royalists wanted it to, and even the tabloids were at pains to put as positive a spin on things as they could. But it was proving difficult to pretend that nothing was wrong. Although there were no verified reports, ‘it’s no secret that the problem arose because William warned Harry against leaping into marriage, and Meghan has never forgiven him. That girl demands nothing less than total adoration, and if she doesn’t get it, you’re iced,’ a royal cousin told me. The press, not quite sure why there was froideur, were full of reports of the Queen ordering the Fab Four to put on a united front, which they did as they walked on Christmas Day from the big house to St. Mary Magdalene Church on the Sandringham estate.
Although Meghan and Harry’s profile in America was high, and they could often be found on the cover or in the pages of magazines like People, the reality was, in Britain, they were not just celebrities the way they were on the other side of the Atlantic. They were intrinsic and fundamental members of the British Royal Family, two parts of the Fab Four whom the press wanted to succeed so they could write about them ad nauseam. The sisters-in-law were perfect foils for each other as well as obvious evocations of their respective stances, and as the two couples gave the press the photo op they yearned for, for a few short hours, the media were able to run with the idea that the Fab Four would continue long into the future. Catherine Cambridge was the picture of traditional royal elegance in a beautifully tailored, buttoned-up, highly visible berry-red double-breasted woollen coat with velvet pockets and collar and matching hat, while Meghan wore a black coat open to reveal her bump, with a form fitting matching dress and a Philip Treacy hat.
By this time, the palace were painfully aware that they had a whole host of problems on their hands. Not only were there the tensions within the Royal Family itself, plus the wastage of Harry’s friends, but the issues between Meghan and her relations had grown into an ongoing concern. Not only were the public in Britain turning against her as a result of her attitude, but people closer to home wanted to know how any daughter could have dumped her father the way she had, especially when she herself had always said that he had been an excellent father?
This is a question I found the answer to by speaking to people who know the various parties well, including relations of his and hers. I came to the conclusion that Meghan had little choice but to behave as she did. She had established common ground with Harry in the most effective way possible: she had hooked him by appealing to his emotions, by presenting herself as a person whose strength had been forged in the crucible of deprivation and pain, just like his, and that she held the keys to happiness. Because theirs was a love match, and there was nothing to hold it together but the bonds that they forged together, the relationship’s very existence would be threatened if third parties began to feed him information that was contradictory to her representations.
Meghan Markle is her own creation, as she confirmed in her two blogs. As she put it, you can be anything you want to be. All you need to do is become it. Fish can become fowl, pink green, and boundless ambition caring humanitarianism. Like all fabrications, the back of the picture is never as polished as the front, but that in itself signifies nothing.
As with all self-inventions, there was a gap between the reality of what Meghan had once been and the facade she was now presenting to the world, Harry included. That was why she had not been able to maintain many of her truly intimate friendships from her past, for Meghan in the present was not the same person as Meghan in the past had been. Indeed, as one Canadian said, the only thing the two Meghans had in common was her body. Virtually everything else was different. As Nikki Priddy said, the Meghan she knew before fame was not the same person she became after it. And while she had liked the former, she deplored the latter so much she did not want to have anything to do with her.
Spoilage of friendships can be viewed as the natural process of growing apart. It’s not so straightforward when parents are involved. Although Meghan had praised her father to the skies publicly, privately she had become concerned that a garrulous loose cannon like Thomas Markle Sr would cough up inconvenient facts which might cause Harry to query aspects of her past which did not accord perfectly with her present version of events. For instance, she had led Harry to believe that she had had a far harder life than she had. She had gained his admiration by making herself out to be far more self-sufficient than she had ever been, to have surmounted struggles that did not exist. She had told him how hard she had had to struggle to put herself through university when, in fact, her time there had been one long joyride on her father’s bandwagon. She didn’t want Tom Sr giving the game away and shining a light on those aspects of her persona which were, to put it politely, self-generated r
ather than organic.
These were sound reasons for not introducing Harry to her father before the wedding. The worst possible scenario for Meghan would have been father and fiancé getting along so well that Daddy would give Harry enough information for him to realise that Flower had not been forged in quite so much steel as Harry thought she had been. He loved her strength. He drew strength and certainty from it. She could not afford to have him question the authenticity of the struggles she had evoked, though, ironically, there had been challenges. They had simply been between Meghan and herself, largely based around her identity and the embarrassment she had felt as she passed for white while being bi-racial. They had not been between Meghan and a harsh, racist world, as she now wanted people to believe, for no one could identify one incident throughout the whole of her life when she had been subjected to racist prejudice, though everyone could remember many times when she had not been subjected to any prejudice at all. Such strictures as she had faced with the world at large had been based solely on her desire to be acknowledged as special, as a star, as someone who was exceptional and out of the ordinary. These were the ordinary, mundane, everyday frustrations of an ordinary but ambitious person who viewed herself as special, pitting herself against the world until they acknowledged her view of herself as being more accurate than their own. In summation, her struggles were the ordinary tussles of an ordinary woman as she surmounted the restrictions of ordinariness until she could change them for the acknowledgement of specialness. It was the conventional journey of people pre and post fame; nothing more, nothing less. It was an everyday tale told by countless people of all hues and creeds. It had nothing to do with racial or sexual prejudice. It certainly had nothing to do with a deprived background, and all to do with the deeply unglamorous strictures of ambition.
Meghan is not an actress for nothing. She understands drama and appreciates its value. She is bright and talented enough to understand that a theatrical narrative is more engaging than a pedestrian one. One plucks at the heartstrings, the other leaves the emotions cold. She had worked herself into the position of prima donna assoluta, and now faced the task of maintaining her ascendency without having inconvenient relations like her father opening her version of events up to inspection. Nor could she convincingly eradicate her father without arousing suspicion. So she controlled his attendance instead. It was obvious that the safest course of action had been to get Tom Sr to fly over just before the wedding. There would be so much going on then, that there would be no time for him to interact too deeply with Harry. Her devoted swain would continue to believe that she was this brave lioness who had fought her way up in a cruel world, instead of being the pampered Flower who had been nurtured the way she really had been.
Harry is a very emotional person. He has great emotional intelligence even though he is not outstanding in its intellectual equivalent. Meghan, on the other hand, is highly intelligent, highly skilled socially, and highly effusive. She functions at a fever pitch of passion, enthusiasm and spontaneity that come across as warmth, though people who have been dumped by her regard her as insincere and opportunistic to a fault. Whether they are right or wrong, she is superficially appealing and captivating, has a talent for making people believe that she is what they want her to be, knows just what note to strike to gain the regard of those she wants to impress, and possesses sang froid in its fullest meaning.
According to people who know them well, Meghan won Harry by appealing to his genuinely humanitarian instincts. She did this by demonstrating her own humanitarian credentials, articulating philanthropic values which she knew he possessed, while making herself vulnerable in his eyes. She endeared herself by appealing to his sympathies, by mirroring them, by making him aware of how much she had suffered at the hands of a cruel world while gaining his admiration for the brave and noble way she had coped. She could not have Daddy blow this touching picture of suffering, which she had never actually experienced, out of the water by shooting his mouth off.
There is much evidence to suggest that Meghan is by far a stronger and more forceful individual than Harry. Beneath the blustering Alpha male lies a sensitive boy who identifies and sympathises with those who have suffered. For all the good works Meghan has done, she has never really suffered loss and therefore does not possess a similar degree of empathy. She is also more strategic than Harry. Like many Army officers, he is good at giving orders, but he is also good at taking them. He functions best in an environment in which he can flex his muscles while having the cover of a safe roof. This the Army used to provide. Now, Meghan does. She, on the other hand, hates taking orders. If necessity requires it, as occurred when she was in Suits, she will cooperate, but only to the extent that it is expedient. And while she’s cooperating, she also negotiates and haggles, making it clear that her cooperation is a sign of strength, not weakness, and certainly not mindlessness. In other words, Meghan is a dominating personality who only surrenders control when she has to. At all other times, she insists on being in the driver’s seat.
Because she has a nurturing, considerate side to her personality, she makes an ideal mate for a man who loved his mother. She makes an even more ideal mate for one who loved and lost his mother. Her dominance comes across to him as caring. He thinks he’s being mothered when in fact those who know and question Meghan’s motives believe he’s being controlled. One indication that there might be some substance to that suspicion is the vow Meghan wrote into the marriage service. She swore to ‘protect’ Harry. How she came to position herself as the protector of a prince is what fascinates. She was able to convince him that she had successfully survived so much pain and suffering, that she had the strength to protect him, a boy who lost his mother and has suffered thereafter. Because her suffering had transformed her from an ordinary woman into an extraordinary human being, he, ordinary man that he is, needs her protection.
People can say what they want about her, but Meghan is truly an amazing woman. Only someone with her remarkable gifts, uniquely imaginative personality, and undoubted cleverness could have forged the bond she did with Harry.
CHAPTER 8
Although Harry truly believed that Meghan and Meghan alone knew the route to the Holy Grail, and she still had her admirers, as she and Harry settled into marriage, an uncomfortable and growing percentage of the populace as well as the press in his native country were coming around to the distressing viewpoint that she was a pretentious piffler with the depth of a teaspoon, the sincerity of a phoney, and the trustworthiness of a fraudster let loose in a roomful of cash. This was disastrous for anyone who had hoped that she would turn the role of Duchess of Sussex into a glorious one. To those of us who understood that she represented something no amount of money could buy, the tainting of her image was laden with long term repercussions. These had the potential to affect race relations negatively, for her supporters might not realise that her detractors’ objections were based largely or entirely upon her performance and what it said about her character, and might instead erroneously conclude that colour prejudice was motivating her unpopularity. This would do no one any good, no one, that is, with the possible exception of anti-monarchists and Meghan herself, who would be given a free pass if she could behave in an inappropriate manner without suffering any adverse consequences and indeed, be taken to be a victim when she was anything but one.
As the situation deteriorated, those who believed that Meghan was a non-contributory victim to her worsening reputation began questioning whether the negative attention might be due to covert colour prejudice, while those who saw her as a contributory factor to her reputation’s demise became increasingly perturbed that they were being accused of racism when in fact her race had nothing to do with her unpopularity. A courtier said, ‘No one [at the palace] believes that either the Duke or the Duchess of Sussex deludes themselves into thinking that racism plays any part in this. But we’re all aware that they’re not above playing the race card if it works to their advantage. They did it before [at
the time their affair became public knowledge] but we’re all hoping they won’t ever do it again. It would be too damaging to the national interest. Prince Harry will see that [and will hopefully prevent it from being played]. But it will nevertheless be damaging to the national interest if they remain silent and allow their supporters to continue blaming racism for something any fool knows has nothing to do with it.’
Because Meghan and Harry’s conduct was creating divisions instead of being the unifying force the monarchy is meant to be, and because the issues being thrown up were larger than simply their personal popularity, the press were on heightened alert. Controversy is always more newsworthy than dullness. A mixed narrative is always more interesting to the media than a straightforward one. Whether Meghan fully realised that her actions were geared towards gaining her ever-increasing amounts of press attention, or she was unintentionally blundering into being a newspaper’s dream figure - with equal parts of glamour, controversy, conflict, conciliation and opposition all heightened with a massive question mark over what lay beneath her buffed surface - the fact is, the move she made shortly after returning from the Antipodean trip which had ended in such drama over her family background, catapulted her further into the forefront of media attention.
On the 11th December 2018, barely a month after a lithe and svelte Meghan had returned to England from their tour, she dramatically burst onto the stage as the unexpected guest of honour at the British Fashion Awards at the Royal Albert Hall. She was there to present an award to Clare Waight Keller, the artistic director of Givenchy who had designed her wedding dress. Depending on your opinion, Meghan either showed what a wonderfully warm and natural human being she was, or the actress turned on the charm which had started to wear thin with many of her critics, striding out onto the podium, her beautifully and professionally made-up face beaming brightly as only hers can, radiating delight and projecting joyousness as only a professional actress occupying a stage can.
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